On a Monday afternoon last April, Hajime Teri Murai
settled behind the piano in his Peabody Conservatory
studio. The Peabody Symphony Orchestra's music director had
much on his mind, but at this moment, foremost was Gustav
Mahler. Murai had just concluded a dress rehearsal of
Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, a darkly beautiful
symphony of six songs, and there were problems. He
considers the piece to be the most difficult music Mahler
ever composed, harder to play than even the composer's
ninth symphony: "It's a piece that you never solve all the
questions about. It has so much depth, you're never going
to get tired of it, [but] no matter how much you play it,
it's always going to be difficult." After a month's work
the Peabody players were reaching the proficiency to play
it properly, if they paid attention. But they were still
missing entrances and failing to count some of the work's
complex rhythmic passages, and Murai didn't have much more
time to prepare them. Tomorrow they would play the work in
concert at Peabody's Friedberg Hall. Three days past that,
they would repeat the performance in New York, at Lincoln
Center's Alice Tully Hall.

Now Murai wanted to go over a few troublesome spots with
the principal cellist, graduate student Barbara Kleewein,
and the program's mezzo-soprano soloist, Theodora Hanslowe,
Peab '92. In summer 2004, Murai had begun assembling the
New York concert. He needed a program that would show off
his orchestra and, he hoped, attract New Yorkers who have
their choice of concerts by the world's foremost players.
"Every professional orchestra in the world goes to New
York," he said. "We don't need to play another Brahms
symphony." Instead, he programmed a pair of contemporary
works, composed by Peabody faculty members Christopher
Theofanidis and Michael Hersch, Peab '97, that had never
been performed in the city. For a third contemporary piece,
Marina Piccinini, on the Peabody flute faculty and a
soloist of growing acclaim, suggested Gran
Danzón: The Bel Air Concerto, a flute concerto
by Cuban composer and jazz musician Paquito D'Rivera.

From the start Murai wanted Hanslowe, a rising star in
American opera, on the bill in New York. Her schedule had
done much to determine the concert's date. She books years
in advance, but when Murai called her in 2004, she
consulted her calendar and found that in April 2006,
between performances with the Baltimore Opera in Dead
Man Walking and the Metropolitan Opera in Handel's
Rodelinda, she had a week free for a Peabody
commitment. Murai signed her up. She was pleased to do
something for the conservatory where she'd earned an artist
diploma, and delighted to sing Das Lied von der
Erde. During her first year as a Peabody student in
1988, the orchestra had scheduled the piece. A few days
before that concert, the faculty member slated to sing the
mezzo role had cancelled, and Hanslowe was called to
substitute. "I had not even heard them before," she said of
the songs that form the piece. "I had to learn them in two
or three days. It was really a mind-blowing experience."

In Murai's studio, Hanslowe patiently worked with the
student cellist, Kleewein, to get a few tricky passages
right. At the piano, Murai stood in for the rest of the
orchestra, pointing out where Kleewein was not correctly
counting certain measures. Mahler had written an
extraordinarily complex score of different implied meters
and rhythms. The effect on the listener is sublime, but the
score makes great demands on musicians. In the
just-concluded rehearsal, the Peabody orchestra had done
some fine playing, but its concentration had wavered. The
concert program would be long, more than two hours, and
would demand sustained attention by young musicians who
sometimes let their minds wander. Murai said, "That's the
difference between working with pros and working with
students. We've got students who have the technical
capabilities of many professionals. But they don't all have
the experience to know how to be performance ready
consistently. So they're going to stop thinking about what
they're doing. They have so much innate ability, they tend
to rely on their instincts. They think they'll just sense
their next entrance. Tchaikovsky or Schumann you can play
by feel. But in all the pieces on this program their
instincts still lead them astray."

The necessary level of concentration hadn't been present
for the full length of the dress rehearsal and Murai had
snapped at the players a few times. The run-through of the
flute concerto had been particularly rough, with messed-up
rhythms and missed entrances that threw off Piccinini, the
soloist, and once actually brought the piece to a halt. The
score is an intricate combination of jazz, classical, and
Cuban elements that D'Rivera had composed for Piccinini.
Part of its difficulty, Murai observed, is that how the
notation looks and how the music is supposed to sound do
not always match. In places, for example, the orchestra has
to swing like a jazz band, but that can only be suggested
in musical notation; it has to be felt. "There aren't a lot
of downbeats," Piccinini observed. "There are a lot of
upbeats, up in the air, which is great for dancing but
really hard for an orchestra." She usually played from
memory, but after the dress rehearsal she was considering
using music for the concerts, in case the orchestra was
ragged again. Nevertheless, after pulling on his jacket to
go home for the evening, Murai seemed relaxed. Tomorrow he
would put everything on the Peabody stage and see what
happened.

The concert in New York would be the biggest
performance of Peabody's season, an expensive, complicated
undertaking, but a rare opportunity for the conservatory's
students. Peabody's last appearance at Alice Tully had been
five years ago, and Murai wasn't sure when the orchestra
might go back again after this week's concert. "Touring
expenses have gone through the roof," he said. The single
concert four days hence would cost the conservatory $60,000
for rental of the hall, transport, food, stagehands,
promotion, hotel, soloists, and other expenses. There
wasn't room in Peabody's budget for many $60,000 nights.
But a concert at Lincoln Center would be a formative
experience for the student musicians and valuable promotion
for the conservatory, a statement that down the road from
New York and Philadelphia there was another noteworthy
music school. "To be taken seriously you have to play New
York," Murai said.

When an orchestra travels to an out-of-town venue, the
performance is called a "run-out." The term is deceptively
casual, as if the ensemble were running out for eggs and
milk. Murai and the Peabody staff had been working more
than 18 months to bring off this one night on a New York
stage, laboring over contracts, scheduling, transport,
food, lodging, promotion, and, not incidentally, music. To
succeed, everyone involved had to get right a staggering
list of logistical and musical details.

In the last few days before the concerts, everyone sweated
over individual responsibilities and tried to anticipate
what might go wrong. In his office, Peabody stage manager
Darryl Carr reviewed the contents of a binder he'd
assembled for the run-out. It was full of phone numbers,
the floor plan for Alice Tully Hall, the stage layout,
details on the hotel, and lists of equipment that would
need to be packed and transported to Manhattan. Carr
scanned the latter and said, "Lot of percussion. Lot of
toys." Carr is responsible for staging about 1,000 events
per year at Peabody, everything from symphony concerts to
instrumental competitions to individual student recitals.
For this week alone in just one of Peabody's halls, he had
to oversee 11 recitals and 15 rehearsals. Every Peabody
event and rehearsal required its own stage set-up with
chairs, music stands, and equipment. "Harpsichords are
popular this week, for some reason," he complained.
"Driving me crazy."

Teresa Perez, director of concert operations, was
responsible for planning the musicians' transport, feeding,
and lodging. Three buses would depart from the conservatory
early Friday morning. So the players could eat before
rehearsing in New York, she had arranged for a caterer to
deliver bag lunches at 7 a.m. and had compiled a detailed
list of dietary requirements to accommodate the vegetarians
and vegans. Reserving the hotel had been a particular
challenge. Perez had to find one located near the concert
hall that would not demand a two-night weekend stay and
"didn't cost $400 a night." She'd booked rooms at the
Wellington Hotel on 55th Street, which made her smile. In
years past, the Wellington had been used by a variety of
not-so-good ensembles as a place to hold auditions. Perez,
a cellist, had actually auditioned there herself, for a job
with an orchestra in Rio de Janeiro.

As director of ensemble operations, Linda Goodwin had
negotiated the concert date at Alice Tully. She was
tracking all the expenses: hall rental, the buses, the
truck, the union stage crew and a piano tuner in New York.
She had a mental list of all that could go wrong: "The
truck could get lost. A bus could break down, which
happened once on a return trip from New York. We could lose
a player, or lose music, or lose an instrument. Flu and
strep have been going around, so somebody could get sick. A
soloist could get sick. Some of the basses need their
instruments for auditions in Philadelphia the day before
the concert. Will the bass cases fit under the bus on
Friday, since they can't go on the truck Thursday? The
program requires a piano, a celesta, two harps, and lots of
percussion and Alice Tully has a smaller stage. How many
string players will fit after all that stuff is on stage?"
Goodwin paused, then said, "I'm looking forward to next
week when this will all be over."

Orchestra member Robin Massie was looking forward to the
performance. She was about six weeks from graduating with a
performance diploma in viola. She had begun violin lessons
at age 8, but in her first year of high school, she'd
picked up a viola that her teacher, Ron Smith, had laying
around. "I put it to my shoulder and pulled the bow across
the strings and knew I'd found my voice," she said. Smith
gave her the viola, which she'd played through her
undergraduate years at the University of Maryland. She
already had performed a few times in New York, once with a
high-school orchestra in Carnegie Hall. "It's always
exciting," she said. "I remember looking around Carnegie
and thinking, Mahler stood here."

The evening of the concert at Peabody, Carr already
was complaining that he needed more sleep. The night
before, he had lain awake, his head full of all that had to
happen — and could happen — in New York. At
least this time he'd not had bad dreams. Two years before,
when he'd worked on the gala celebration of the
conservatory's massive renovations, he'd had nightmares
about the stage collapsing. Tonight, he had a more
immediate concern: a bassoonist who had stumbled backstage
at Friedberg Hall and suffered a nasty lump on her shin. He
dispatched one of his student stagehands to fetch ice from
the machine at Peabody's Elderhostel building.

Meanwhile Goodwin checked in musicians as they arrived for
the evening's performance, handing each a New York
itinerary and making sure they'd brought everything they
needed for tonight's concert. She also scrutinized outfits.
At the dress rehearsal, she had admonished the young women
not to wear shirts that might hike up as they played,
exposing their midriffs. "No Britney Spears tops," she'd
warned.

Backstage, strings warmed up in one room, woodwinds in
another, brass in a third. Someone had scrawled on a
chalkboard, "The steady march toward madness begins!!!"
Murai scurried about, music in hand, holding last-minute
conferences. He stopped a violinist and pointed out
something in the score, then went looking for a piccolo
player. When he found her, they conferred for a moment and
she marked her music. He moved on to another player and
said, "You've got to listen to the harp and match her
there, because she can't change." Next he chatted with
Piccinini and Hersch, making more last-minute notes.

When Murai took the stage for the opening downbeat, the
audience was disappointingly small. The program opened with
Theofanidis' Rainbow Body, a lovely, melodic
13-minute composition that three years earlier had won the
world's largest competition for new music, the Masterprize
Competition. The piece's stirring conclusion was punctuated
by several cheers from the musicians — hurrahs that
were actually in the score, added by Theofanidis after he'd
heard some exuberant London Symphony players cheering
during a rehearsal. The Peabody musicians seemed to love
it, and as Theofanidis listened he heard an unbroken
intensity that moved him.

In the audience, Theofanidis sat next to Hersch, whose
composition Arraché was next on the program.
Hersch, who didn't begin serious pursuit of music until he
was 18, had studied composition at Peabody and in only a
few years had established himself as one of the new stars
of American composition. His Arraché is a
technically challenging piece that ends in a quintuple
fugue, demanding the sort of concentration that had wavered
during rehearsal the day before. Tonight, the orchestra was
sharp, its concentration focused. Later Hersch would tell
them, "It's not often I feel that orchestras are
communicating, even professional orchestras, and I feel you
guys are really doing that." Through the D'Rivera and the
long concluding hour of Das Lied von der Erde, the
players maintained their focus and played superbly.
Afterwards, Massie, the young violist, succinctly, and
accurately, characterized their playing of the Mahler:
"With fury and precision."

At a Thursday touch-up rehearsal the morning before
they headed for New York, Murai told his musicians, "You
were sensational the other night. Now you get an
opportunity to be more sensational."

Before the rehearsal commenced, Carr strolled in clutching
a very large coffee mug. Someone asked him, "What's the
weather forecast for New York?"

"Wet," he replied.

"That makes you happy."

"Oh yeah. Never fails."

Ten minutes before the start of rehearsal, Murai arrived,
dressed as usual all in black. Immediately he grabbed his
score and conferred with first an oboe player, then a
harpist. He was in a chipper mood. When Theofanidis walked
up to chat, Murai said, "When you're rich and famous, will
you remember us?"

The players kept their concentration as Murai led them
through music so complex that Mahler had once asked the
conductor Bruno Walter, "Have you the slightest idea how to
conduct this? I haven't!"

At 10:30 a.m., Goodwin addressed the players. "I know
you're not a morning orchestra," she said. "So remember the
bus is leaving at 7:30 tomorrow. I did scrutinize outfits
the other night. There were a number of ladies with
open-toed shoes. Be aware that I will be taking black
gaffing tape to New York and you will find yourself with
tape on your open-toed shoes."

Murai led the orchestra through Theofanidis' Rainbow
Body. Several of the players smiled when they came to
the cheering sections; everyone seemed in a buoyant mood.
"There are a lot of nice things happening, guys," Murai
told them. "You have a different energy now because you've
been through it. Violins, we still have intonation issues
at letter 'G.' Can you resolve that? It's at the start
where we lose you. Piano, at 'C' just let it ring until the
strings start. Keep the pedal down. Trombones can give
more, trumpets too." They played the Hersch piece, and
Murai continued to tweak. "Bassoons need to bring their
parts out more. Clarinets, the figure at 22 and 24 needs to
be more prominent. More oboe, too. We need an edgier, more
metallic sound from the trombones, not so rounded." They
skipped the flute concerto to concentrate on the Mahler in
the time they had left. To sharpen their sense of how it
should be played, Murai had the wind players sing a passage
in unison. Some members of the string section chuckled, and
Murai said, "Don't laugh, you're next." On their turn, the
string players hammed it up and now everyone laughed. The
Mahler ends with trombones and woodwinds softly sustaining
the final chord under brief arpeggios from harp and
mandolin. After the final note, Murai lowered his baton and
said, "Don't you love this? It's just incredible."

Friday in Baltimore dawned drizzly, and at 7:15 as
the orchestra filed onto the buses for the trip to New
York, the day's first crisis was missing sandwiches. Not an
errant turkey here or a wayward roast beef there, but all
the sandwiches. In less than 15 minutes, the buses were due
to roll off for the four-hour drive to Alice Tully Hall.
Where was the caterer with everyone's lunch? Perez and
Goodwin began to think of a contingency plan. Would the
buses have to make an unscheduled stop somewhere along the
New Jersey Turnpike?

A few minutes before the scheduled departure time, Perez
stepped onto the lead bus clutching white paper sacks.
"I've got two vegans," she announced. The lunches had
finally arrived. So had a flute player delayed by a late
taxi driver, the last of about 100 musicians to check in.
(Unfortunately, violist Robin Massie was not one of them.
She had to remain in Maryland to care for an ailing aunt.)
The trio of buses could head out. The lead bus carried the
Peabody stage crew, who would unload the equipment truck in
New York, and the percussionists, who filled the back
seats. Anastasia Pike, a harpist, grabbed the front seat
because she planned to nap and wanted to be as far from the
drummers as possible. "I figure they'll be banging on
stuff," she said.

She didn't get much sleep after someone popped a cassette
of Wayne's World into the bus' video system, then
stagehand Matt Mattera, a trumpet player at Peabody, loaded
the new CD from his rock 'n' roll band, Infusion. The drive
proved uneventful and swift, and the buses slid into
parking spaces by the Alice Tully Hall performers' entrance
at 11:35. Goodwin asked everyone on board to relax because
the contract with the hall did not permit entry until noon.
The musicians chewed their sandwiches and fresh fruit,
placed calls on their cell phones, and eyed the Tower
Records shop across the street. At the stroke of noon, Carr
and his crew began hauling gear from the truck and setting
it on the loading dock, where union work rules dictated
they couldn't touch it again; the hall's stagehands would
take it from here. There were cartons of percussion gear, a
gong, a marimba. Stools upside down in a drum carton, their
legs in the air. Three large bass cases, one bearing a
sticker: Bass — The Lowest Form of Music.

Two hours later, everyone found a seat on the Alice Tully
stage and Murai held up his hand to begin one last
rehearsal. His assistant conductor, Ana Zorana Brajovic,
went from seat to seat, listening to what the audience
would hear. Murai and Hanslowe had been working all week to
keep the orchestra in the Mahler from overpowering her when
she sang in her lower register. Brajovic was working to
ensure that wouldn't happen in the concert. After a few
sections, Murai told the players, "It's a live hall, which
will open the tone up but puts a premium on your ability to
play softly. You guys sound great." For more than two hours
they rehearsed before he released them to walk across the
Lincoln Center campus for a chicken dinner, provided by the
Juilliard School's cafeteria.

At 7:35 p.m., more than 12 hours into the day, Carr yawned
backstage and said, "We've got three hours to go before
load-out. I'll tell you this: That stuff's gonna hit the
street fast." As musicians filed past Goodwin, many
clutching plastic bags with new purchases from Tower
Records, she checked outfits. Everyone was in proper
concert finery, nary a bare midriff or open-toed shoe in
sight. A few minutes before the opening downbeat at 8 p.m.,
Murai came in, dressed in white tie and tails, drinking
from a bottle of citrus-flavored water, brand-name
"Perform." He had been across the street at a friend's
apartment, where he'd been able to grab a quick nap and, as
he put it, "clear my mind and then load it back up
again."

When he stepped on to the stage and strode to his podium,
Murai was confident of his orchestra. He later said that
from the first note of the day's earlier rehearsal, he knew
his players were primed for a great performance. Behind him
as he raised the baton for the opening downbeat, the size
of the audience was disappointing, with less than half the
hall's 1,100 seats filled. It was too bad the crowd wasn't
bigger because, as Murai had sensed, the musicians were on
their game again. In the audience, Theofanidis was
immediately impressed by the power of the orchestra's sound
in the New York hall as they launched into Rainbow
Body. After excellent readings of that piece and
Hersch's Arraché, the orchestra dove into the
D'Rivera flute concerto. Piccinini, in a deep red gown,
played it safe and again read from music, but as they had
in the Baltimore concert, the orchestra players turned in
an attentive performance that drew praise from the flutist.
Murai said, "They made some mental mistakes they hadn't
made before, but nothing you would notice from the
audience. It was too long of a day for them without a
break. They never had a chance to go to their hotel and
relax, even for an hour. That's the reality of touring."

At the intermission, Murai came backstage and toweled off
his glistening face. The players drank cups of ice water
and talked softly. They knew they were playing well, but
they still had to contend with the Mahler, meaning they
would need to summon one more hour of intense
concentration. Mahler based his 1908 cycle of six songs on
German adaptations by Hans Bethge of some melancholy
8th-century Chinese poetry. The first song has the refrain,
"Dark is life, is death," and ends with the macabre image
of an ape howling in a graveyard. The shorter songs in the
middle meditate on loneliness, youth, beauty, and the
fleeting joy of being drunk in the spring. The work
concludes with a final, complex, enormously difficult song
that's nearly as long as all five that precede it. Said
Murai of the last movement, "Nothing is the same twice.
It's the same material, but it never comes back in the same
version. He adds a quarter-note here, he adds a bar there,
he adds a bar-and-a-half here, he throws in parts in
counterpoint to each other, he extends one, he doesn't
extend the other. And the changes are not things you can
predict." Though it had to be tired, the orchestra still
sounded strong and confident as it backed Hanslowe and
tenor Michael Hayes. The players kept their concentration
as Murai led them through music so complex that Mahler had
once asked the conductor Bruno Walter, "Have you the
slightest idea how to conduct this? I haven't!" In the
audience, Hersch listened to the climax and thought it was
among the best he'd ever heard. The problems of earlier in
the week were history. When it mattered, on the New York
stage, the players delivered. Said Murai, "For a student
orchestra to come into New York and play that program is
impressive. To play it at the level we played it,
especially given where we started. . . . They came from
being unfamiliar with all of these pieces to delivering
that performance. I was very proud of them."

Backstage, as the players had begun the long final
movement, Carr had uncapped a bottle of spirits and poured
celebratory drinks for Perez, Goodwin, and the rest of the
behind-the-scenes staff. Immediately after the concert, the
musicians would head for the lobby and a reception, and the
Peabody crew would load the truck for the trip back to
Baltimore the next day. Tired as he was, Carr was thinking
about heading downtown to find some jazz. Almost everything
had gone right as planned; a day in which late sandwiches
constituted the biggest crisis was a good day. Carr picked
up the binder with all his papers and charts and
checklists. He peeled from its cover the handbill for the
concert and dropped it in a trash can. Job done.